Memoir

First, a disclaimer. Since 1975 I’ve had a sneaking affection for Jim Cairns. At that time, I was flirting with various environmental causes – as you do at the age of nine. I circulated some petitions at my primary school calling for the preservation of the Tasmanian south-west from its concrete-crazed Hydroelectricity Commission. I forwarded these to a string of political power-brokers, identified rather shrewdly by their appearances on the ABC news.

Clive James is a fussy A-grade mechanic of the English language, always on the lookout for grammatical misfires or sloppiness of phrasing that escape detection on publishing production lines. Us/we crashtest dummies of the written word, who drive by computer, with squiggly red and green underlinings ...

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.

Sydney, as everybody knows, is Australia’s world city, always has been. It offers the urban metonym – Opera House sails – which, together with Uluru, is Australia to the outside world. And it generates, or generated, a particular kind of intellectual, the Sydney larrikin, rogue male. These books claim to cover two such, Bobs Hughes and Ellis. How might we receive them?

For some of us, it is hard to believe that Neil Finn is on the verge of middle age. Recruited in 1977 by his older brother Tim to replace Phil Judd in Split Enz, Neil first entered public consciousness as a teenager who apparently had never before played electric guitar. Within two years, he was the lead vocal on ‘I Got You’, the song that propelled Split Enz to the top of the charts not just in Australasia but in Britain, too. Significantly for a band that had relied on Tim as the songwriter, it was Neil’s song. In the twenty-one years since then, Neil has fashioned a reputation as a master of conventional popular songcraft, chiefly through the post-Split Enz trio, Crowded House, and, more recently, as a solo artist.

Any book documenting the life and work of a famous artist invariably paints a picture of an era. This autobiography by the outstanding Australian contralto Lauris Elms is no exception. The postwar years in Australia saw the emergence of so many talented young singers that one can’t help but label that period a ‘golden age’. At a time when many of them, almost by necessity, departed for Europe or the UK, their combined successes on the world opera stage never ceases to amaze. An enviable standard was set which has been maintained to this day, even if the individual successes are not quite so spectacular.

In the sixteenth century a Swiss physician and alchemist by the name of Paracelsus claimed that everything was potentially poisonous, as long as you took enough of it: ‘the right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.’ There is plenty of evidence to support this point of view. Legal claims for damages caused by asbestos and passive smoking are reminders that what may be a safe environment for some can be toxic for others. Indeed, one of the most common forms of contemporary poisoning is known as an ‘overdose’. The substance was fine. The amount was wrong.